Honor Harrington - Should I pick it up?

[Cheesegear]

The Mary Sue thing... I guess I can kinda see what everyone means. Harrington's awesome, practically superhuman.

I thought it was revealed maybe around Book 5 or 6...

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She is a super human. Hence her metabolism. Then she gets a bionic eye and a super-strength arm.

Good people like Honor, bad people don't... I agree, it's not realistic

Isn't it? She's a decorated war hero, and is shown to have great personal charisma, and not a small amount of intelligence. Likeable people are just likeable. There are several examples in my own life that I can think of, and I'm sure a lot of other people can, too. However, it doesn't make a good story. However realistic it may be.

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It also helps that she's an empath, and can deliberately tell people what they want to hear. Or at least know when someone doesn't like her, take steps, and then bang. Friends.

[HandofShadows]

I thought it was revealed maybe around Book 5 or 6...

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She is a super human. Hence her metabolism. Then she gets a bionic eye and a super-strength arm.

Spoiler: Good Point

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People tend to forget that Honor is a genetically modified person designed for heavy gravity conditions (much stronger than a normal human). Also got an improved set of reflexes out of it. IIRC there might have been some tweeks to her mind as well that Treecats seem to "like". Note all these modifications are inherited. The Wintons are also modified some. Lastly, though Honor looks young, she many decades older than she looks. That gives her time to build up an immense number of skills. She does pay a cost though. She can't regenerate like other people can. That's why she has that Super-Strength Arm with a Gun in it. Can't forget the gun.

[smuchmuch]

THe main problems are Weber's tendency to infodump in the wrong places (a long dissertation on the physics of spaceflight in your universe is something you need to elucidate on, but he should have done it before a climactic battle instead of during it)

"Honor is always right about everything, and anyone who fails to immediately love her upon their first meeting - let alone disagree with her - is irredeemably stupid and evil" just gets too thick.

Obviously, there's only one Good Guy in any fight. Both sides can't be justified, and both sides can't have their own heroes

While she may not be right quite all the time, it feels that way. Even her defeats feel like victories, in that anyone else would have done much, much worse (and they always set up greater victories).

Oh woah, that really does sound like Hornblower in Space !
Does she get promoted to bigger ships every three books or so ?

I am tempted to try it. The one big default of Hornblower was it's tendency to be quite formulaic, though, is it qtill the case here ?

[Cheesegear]

Oh woah, that really does sound like Hornblower in Space !
Does she get promoted to bigger ships every three books or so ?

YES.

But, I liked Hornblower.

[HandofShadows]

Oh woah, that really does sound like Hornblower in Space !
Does she get promoted to bigger ships every three books or so ?

Kinda. But in a VERY rapidly expanding Navy it is justifiable.

[FLHerne]

It does get explained, though. It just comes out in bits and pieces, mostly in the short stories and later adjoining novels.
[snipped long explanation]

Ooh, neat. Thanks.
I read the various spinoffs in a rather random order, so I must have missed some connections somewhere.
Nothing can make the MA seem plausible though.

Oh woah, that really does sound like Hornblower in Space !
Does she get promoted to bigger ships every three books or so?
The one big default of Hornblower was it's tendency to be quite formulaic, though, is it qtill the case here?

Yes, until they run out of 'bigger ships'. Then she gets bigger fleets instead. After

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the Second Battle of Manticore

it's difficult to see what they can give her next.*

Actually, it's quite nice, helps avoid it getting too formulaic.

*They should try fish. There's always a bigger one. She might even be able to use them more sensibly than Jim.

[The Glyphstone]

Ooh, neat. Thanks.
I read the various spinoffs in a rather random order, so I must have missed some connections somewhere.
Nothing can make the MA seem plausible though.

Honestly, I think that's partly intentional. The concept of a centuries-spanning secret society isn't unreasonable when people actually live for centuries...but the idea that they can actually pull off their Evil Plan of Evil is utterly implausible, and that's a big part of why it is going off the rails so spectacularly in 'real-time'.

Anyway, to come back around to the point, I love the Harrington stories. In fact there's very little by David Weber that I don't like. Path of the Fury, Mutineer's Moon, Apocalypse Troll, Oath of Swords... All amazing.

Please don't say you liked Out of the Dark.

I thought it was revealed maybe around Book 5 or 6...

Spoiler

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She is a super human. Hence her metabolism. Then she gets a bionic eye and a super-strength arm.

Spoiler

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Though it usually gets lost in the muddle that she has the bionic eye from being shot in the face with a spacefuture sledgehammer pistol, and the arm after having her real one amputated via spacefuture heavy machine gun. And unlike most of the rest of the universe, she can't regrow missing body parts at will.

[warty goblin]

Please don't say you liked Out of the Dark.

Was that the one with the invading aliens and vampires? I only read it in short story form, and holy crap was that a terrible story. The vampires were bad enough, the bit where the militaristic space aliens had apparently never considered the possibility of heavy machine guns was even stupider.

[The Glyphstone]

Was that the one with the invading aliens and vampires? I only read it in short story form, and holy crap was that a terrible story. The vampires were bad enough, the bit where the militaristic space aliens had apparently never considered the possibility of heavy machine guns was even stupider.

That is the one, yes. What David was smoking when he wrote that, I have no idea.

[FLHerne]

Honestly, I think that's partly intentional. The concept of a centuries-spanning secret society isn't unreasonable when people actually live for centuries...but the idea that they can actually pull off their Evil Plan of Evil is utterly implausible, and that's a big part of why it is going off the rails so spectacularly in 'real-time'.

Except that even first-generation prolong has only existed for 120 years or so (Rajampet was apparently one of the first recipients, at about the maximum age possible (20? 40? something like that) and is 150-odd now.
That means the ludicrous conspiracy existed for hundreds of years with normal human generations, between a group of individuals with substantially-modified genomes that would likely be detected and correlated even with today's healthcare, and inexplicably manipulated pan-galactic politics for the entire time with not a single person letting anything slip.

Infodump-wise, I just read that bit (in MoH) where he drops a 5-page infodump in the start of an action sequence, which ends with (not exactly) 'but this was wasn't relevant to 10th Fleet anyway, because they weren't equipped with the hardware I just explained to you'.

Nope, no idea what Out of the Dark was supposed to be. It starts out as a fun-but-not-solid alien-invasion story, and then um.

[Dragonus45]

That is the one, yes. What David was smoking when he wrote that, I have no idea.

He was smoking pure awesome, I love that one myself.

[The Glyphstone]

Except that even first-generation prolong has only existed for 120 years or so (Rajampet was apparently one of the first recipients, at about the maximum age possible (20? 40? something like that) and is 150-odd now.
That means the ludicrous conspiracy existed for hundreds of years with normal human generations, between a group of individuals with substantially-modified genomes that would likely be detected and correlated even with today's healthcare, and inexplicably manipulated pan-galactic politics for the entire time with not a single person letting anything slip.
\.

I'll bet you also deny the existence of the Illuminati and the Lizard People too. Clearly, they've gotten to you already.


But in serious, I think you're underestimating the Mesans just a bit. By the timeline, Leonard Detweiler split off from the Beowulf community about 500 years pre-novels. Now remember that we are talking about the galaxy's best geneticists/biological engineers, in terms of pure skill and experience, who were already tinkering the hell out of their own geonomes for improvements. Their lifespans would undoubtedly have been well beyond 'human normal' even pre-prolong, so figure a 100-year lifespan average for the alphas in charge of the whole thing. Most of their key lines, if I remember right, were only implanted on-site one or two generations previously cutting the time they need to stay secret from the galaxy instead of just one planet of corrupt criminal businesspeople in half. Genetic intelligence boosts in Honorverse are correlated to aggression and/or sociopathy, but when the people involved are already megalomaniacs, that's not much of a downside - so now they're also supergeniuses, in addition to be extra long-lived. Add in the 'onion' strategy where even most Alphas don't know the Alignment exists, and you've got a very solid base for a conspiracy. Especially when the outer 'onion' layer is a nefarious evil bunch of genetic slavers, who have perfectly plausible reasons of their own to be manipulating politicians and military officers.

How would they be 'detected and correlated', anyways? It's not like we have Star Trek tricorders that can instantly scan a person's geonome, it's a fairly involved lab procedure to completely map a person's genonome. No Mesan agent would be voluntarily having their DNA recorded, so all they need to remain secret there is not commit crimes that would result in DNA sampling being necessary...not real hard.

500 years of compound interest alone would be unfathomable amounts of money, ignoring their profits from slave-trading, so I don't see their ability to ply secret influence in a bureaucratic society as corruption-riddled as the Solarian League to be exceptional at all - even if the League was relatively honest, the sheer size of the entity would let a bunch of people not wearing giant neon signs on their heads slip through the cracks.

[Gnoman]

How would they be 'detected and correlated', anyways? It's not like we have Star Trek tricorders that can instantly scan a person's geonome, it's a fairly involved lab procedure to completely map a person's genonome. No Mesan agent would be voluntarily having their DNA recorded, so all they need to remain secret there is not commit crimes that would result in DNA sampling being necessary...not real hard.

Besides that, in the HH universe, genetic modification is nothing unusual. Before the Beowulf Code, modifying colonists to fit a new homeworld was standard procedure. Even afterward, it is a standard method of treatment, although usually that's fairly low-level repairs rather than reworking. That's even before you get into the "tailored genetic sex slave" angle, which tend to produce children that bear their gene modifications (the best example I can think of is a character in one book stroking her naturally-blue hair that was a legacy of a rich grandfather with eccentric tastes. If for some reason a gene-scan had to be done on an Alpha, the exchange would probaby go something like this:

Doctor: That's odd, your genetic structure shows signs of tampering, with the result that you have above average abilities in all ways.
Alpha: Huh. I did not know that about myself.

[Foeofthelance]

Except that even first-generation prolong has only existed for 120 years or so (Rajampet was apparently one of the first recipients, at about the maximum age possible (20? 40? something like that) and is 150-odd now.
That means the ludicrous conspiracy existed for hundreds of years with normal human generations, between a group of individuals with substantially-modified genomes that would likely be detected and correlated even with today's healthcare, and inexplicably manipulated pan-galactic politics for the entire time with not a single person letting anything slip.

Infodump-wise, I just read that bit (in MoH) where he drops a 5-page infodump in the start of an action sequence, which ends with (not exactly) 'but this was wasn't relevant to 10th Fleet anyway, because they weren't equipped with the hardware I just explained to you'.

Nope, no idea what Out of the Dark was supposed to be. It starts out as a fun-but-not-solid alien-invasion story, and then um.

The thing about the MA conspiracy, is up until Flint got involved it consisted of doing two things:

1) Selling genetic slaves to unscrupulous buyers.
2) Bribing and blackmailing corrupt politicians.

It was the combination of Zilwicki getting his hands on the Manpower files, the liberation of Torch, and Giancola's manipulating the diplomatic mail that has forced them to start actually moving ahead with thing such as Oyster Bay. Even that hasn't been enough, as Dettweiler as effectively pushed the evac button as of Cauldron of Ghosts, because to a certain extent you're right. As long as the conspiracy was limited to the usual petty crime and Dettweiler's heirs stroking their beards while praising how clever they all were for playing God, then no one cared. Now that their little plan has become public knowledge, oh look! Someone sent a battlefleet to go park on their front doorstep.

And I liked Out of the Dark! The twist at the end was, yes, more than a little out of left field, but I kinda want to see what happens when you let vampires loose on an unsuspecting galaxy.

[Cheesegear]

I kinda want to see what happens when you let vampires loose on an unsuspecting galaxy.

Deathstalker does it way better.

[Hexapuma]

Please don't say you liked Out of the Dark.

I haven't actually read "Out of the Dark". In fact I'd never heard of it until just now. Seeing it was edited by George R R Martin doesn't really make me want to read it either. To be fair I didn't like any of the Starfire books he wrote with Steve White and I've never got around to reading the Safehold series.

As for the MA stories kinda popping up out of nowhere, there is a reason for that. It's due to the radical change in story around book 11.

Spoiler: Spoilers for book 11 and thereabouts.

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Originally Honor Harrington was planned to die in Operation Beatrice and the battle of Manticore. Haven was supposed to win and conquer the planet. The next books were supposed to be twenty T-years down the line with Harrington's children taking up their mother's banner from a seat on Grayson and reconquering Manticore before all the Mesan Alignment and Solarian stuff kicked off. There was supposed to be another half dozen books in there to give Weber time to introduce the conspiracy gently. As it was, Eric Flint wrote Crown of Slaves which accelerated the timetable and removed the need to kill off Weber's biggest character. (I'm still pissed about Alistair McKeon but there you go.)

[Foeofthelance]

I get the feeling there are two versions of Out of the Dark; there's a short story version, and the novel length version that is supposed to be the first book of a trilogy, if memory serves.

[Cikomyr]

Sorry for the thread necro. I just wanted to give a quick update

Decided to pick up this light pulp sci-fi series during my vacation as light reading. Loved Basilisk Station, finished it in 3 days. Good book, agree that the history of technobabble broke the flow of the battle, but i just droned out after a page and got the point "the bad ship should not be allowed to reach point X"

The fact that everyone admired Honor was eye rolling at times, but meh. Didnt cared much.

Starting the second book now!!

[The Glyphstone]

Get ready to give your eye muscles a workout, then. OBS isn't a great book as far as the series goes (far from the worst, though), but it's also fairly low on the scale of 'side character converts to Honor worship'; the only person who starts out disliking her and turns into an advocate is McKeon.

I think one of the issues that may be at fault is a certain bit of informed competence. We're told that Honor is already an experienced and skilled captain, but her thirty-odd years of service are all in backstory. In her first 'fight' onscreen, she gets in one sneak attack then is thrown around like a punching bag in the exercises, leading to the events of the actual plot.

[Cikomyr]

Get ready to give your eye muscles a workout, then. OBS isn't a great book as far as the series goes (far from the worst, though), but it's also fairly low on the scale of 'side character converts to Honor worship'; the only person who starts out disliking her and turns into an advocate is McKeon.

I think one of the issues that may be at fault is a certain bit of informed competence. We're told that Honor is already an experienced and skilled captain, but her thirty-odd years of service are all in backstory. In her first 'fight' onscreen, she gets in one sneak attack then is thrown around like a punching bag in the exercises, leading to the events of the actual plot.

Nah. Her subbordinates' love for her was 100% understandable. McKeon's resentfulness was actually FORCED, in my opinion. It felt out of place and unnatural.

Same thing, her superiors's appreciation of her actually doing her job as opposed to her predecessors' is 100% fine. Same thing for her partners in the Basilisk System (the Lady, the Captain of the TSA and the TLA major), they loved her, and for good reason.

Also, since Young was outright hated by everyone, it felt natural that many peoplr had a soft spot for the Captain who made him look like an ass.

But things started to push it when the ENNEMY COMMANDER starts admiring her competence and resilience. Come on.

Also, the MRN's technology was a bit mary-sueness. "Oh my god, their ECM and point defense are waaaay better than anyone of.our Intel Projections!!" Was out of nowhere. Only one of the navy between Haven and Manticore has been in a quasi state of warfare in the past 60 years. And it ain't Manticore.

But it was darn fun nonetheless. And thats what matters for a Pulp Sci Fi Book

[brionl]

If nothing else, at the end of the day one is always left with the baffling question of why a person is reading a "Horatio Hornblower but ___' book, instead of just cutting to the chase and reading an actual Horatio Hornblower book.

Because there are only, what, Seven of those? Less than Ten anyway.

I've been reading them all, but I skip a lot of the moustache twirling, and the "launched eleventy-million missiles and 36.3% of them got blowed up" stuff.

[Cikomyr]

Because there are only, what, Seven of those? Less than Ten anyway.

I've been reading them all, but I skip a lot of the moustache twirling, and the "launched eleventy-million missiles and 36.3% of them got blowed up" stuff.

Again, i only read the first book..

...but i kind of liked the Missile fire exchange between the Fearless and the Sirius. Especially the "17 to 1 missile ratio" description.

Really vivid depiction of just how badly she was outclassed.

[brionl]

San Martin is the Trevor's Star system everyone keeps talking about. That's were all the fighting is. Yet we never hear about it, but Kuzak manages to hold the system for seven books. That would actually really impressive if the series didn't focus on just Harrington.

Surely you're not suggesting Weber should do like G.R.R. Martin and have hundreds of different POV characters spinning off the "plot" in all directions? Because we all know how well that works out.

[brionl]

That's when you need to point out real life consequences, and note that there's only one response to waking up and finding that a guy (whom you've never invited in your house) is in your bedroom while you sleep. And starting a romantic relationship with him isn't it.

Something like this:

[brionl]

Again, i only read the first book..

...but i kind of liked the Missile fire exchange between the Fearless and the Sirius. Especially the "17 to 1 missile ratio" description.

Really vivid depiction of just how badly she was outclassed.

I meant the Horatio Hornblower books. Now I'm gonna have to actually look it up and there are actually 11 of them. But I read all of them decades ago. And the Aubrey & Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian.

The first couple of times you get the extended missile exchange sequences it's OK. But later in the series when you start getting tens to hundreds of thousands of missiles flying around it gets a bit repetitive.

Not that I don't like the books anyway, as I said I just skip that part.

[Douglas]

Also, the MRN's technology was a bit mary-sueness. "Oh my god, their ECM and point defense are waaaay better than anyone of.our Intel Projections!!" Was out of nowhere. Only one of the navy between Haven and Manticore has been in a quasi state of warfare in the past 60 years. And it ain't Manticore.

Haven has been in a quasi state of warfare for 60+ years, but almost always with minor nations it can squash with overwhelming numbers while barely trying. Haven also has an overwhelming majority of its population stuck in entitlement welfare, lazing around and "graduating" from an education system that literally isn't allowed to give anyone a failing grade.

Manticore has seen Haven coming for nearly all of those 60+ years and has been frantically preparing for it, knowing that when the war finally reaches them they'll be ridiculously outnumbered. Manticore also has a capitalist free market economy and a societal expectation of hard work and excellence.

Essentially, the entire setting was specifically hand-crafted to set up a quality vs quantity epic showdown, with a bit of moral/political sermonizing on the side, and Manticore is the designated "quality" side. Thus, everything Manticore has is near-automatically better, though less numerous, than anything Haven has.

[Cheesegear]

Surely you're not suggesting Weber should do like G.R.R. Martin and have hundreds of different POV characters spinning off the "plot" in all directions? Because we all know how well that works out.

Not at all. I like when the POV switches to Theisman, I liked the one time it switched to Horace Harkness. I don't like when it switches to Hamish, because I don't like Hamish. I thought the Aubrey Wanderman storyline came out of nowhere, but, whatever.

Henke got her own series (and it is the best). But, my point was then (and still is, now), that I really want to read about what's happening at Trevor's Star/San Martin. Not as an interrupt in the main books, but like Henke, with her own series, independent of HH.

[Douglas]

Henke got her own series (and it is the best). But, my point was then (and still is, now), that I really want to read about what's happening at Trevor's Star/San Martin. Not as an interrupt in the main books, but like Henke, with her own series, independent of HH.

My impression was that actually nothing much happened there. Manticore considered it an absolutely essential system, just slightly below Manticore itself in importance, and accordingly stationed a gigantic and well supplied fleet there semi-permanently. Haven took one look at that fleet, said "we can't take that on directly", and proceeded to direct all their efforts elsewhere, keeping enough force nearby to force Manticore to keep that giant fleet where it was, but otherwise leaving it alone. The only exceptions were the major multi-front fleet operations that formed the climaxes of certain books, so Kuzak really didn't have much to do but drills.

Henke's side series features interesting stuff in large part because the force available to her is not sufficient to solve her problems through deterrence alone.

[The Glyphstone]

But things started to push it when the ENNEMY COMMANDER starts admiring her competence and resilience. Come on.

Also, the MRN's technology was a bit mary-sueness. "Oh my god, their ECM and point defense are waaaay better than anyone of.our Intel Projections!!" Was out of nowhere. Only one of the navy between Haven and Manticore has been in a quasi state of warfare in the past 60 years. And it ain't Manticore.

But it was darn fun nonetheless. And thats what matters for a Pulp Sci Fi Book

Yeah, like Douglas points out, Haven hasn't actually been at war for 60 years. They've been the biggest bully in the playground pushing around smaller children for 60 years, and never met someone capable of even giving them a real fight. If you survive through the series all the way to where the Solarian League starts mattering, you'll see a very similar theme popping up; when you are the biggest and baddest in your neighborhood already (as far as you know), there is no pressure to do R&D, or really improve what you have in any fashion at all. It's even worse for Haven with their welfare culture on steroids, where there isn't even motivation to work hard on a personal level, whereas 'plucky underdog' Manticore knows they can't match Haven economically, so they turned to beating them technologically.

as far as Coglin admiring her...see welfare culture above. Even baseline courage, let alone the sort of suicidal at-all-costs determination Honor's showing by walking right into his ship's firepower, is vanishingly rare in Havenite society at this point, even in their military, so seeing it in an enemy he's trying his hardest to kill is worth mentioning. Worthy Enemies is another theme you will see repeatedly in Weber's books, and since it goes both ways, it's more tolerable - Manticore obviously gets the lion's share because they are the Good Guys, but there will be characters on both sides of the conflict who earn respect from their opposite numbers simply for being so good at what they do. When you meet a fleet commander (again, from either side) who's bluntly contemptuous and dismissive of the other side's abilities, this is thorough telegraphing that they are shortly due for an ass-kicking.

My impression was that actually nothing much happened there. Manticore considered it an absolutely essential system, just slightly below Manticore itself in importance, and accordingly stationed a gigantic and well supplied fleet there semi-permanently. Haven took one look at that fleet, said "we can't take that on directly", and proceeded to direct all their efforts elsewhere, keeping enough force nearby to force Manticore to keep that giant fleet where it was, but otherwise leaving it alone. The only exceptions were the major multi-front fleet operations that formed the climaxes of certain books, so Kuzak really didn't have much to do but drills.

Personally, I would have loved to see a bit of the White Haven/McQueen conflict centered around taking Trevor's Star in the first place. The two best strategists of the war era going head to head and it happens entirely off-screen.

[Rodin]

Personally, I would have loved to see a bit of the White Haven/McQueen conflict centered around taking Trevor's Star in the first place. The two best strategists of the war era going head to head and it happens entirely off-screen.

I would have loved to have seen both this and the Third Battle of Yeltsin's Star. We're told that Admiral Parnell basically magicked his fleet out of that ambush to the point where even he doesn't remember how he did it. It would have been a spectacular fight to see told.

I kinda wish he'd gone on and filled in details like that rather than continuing on from Ashes of Victory. The Sollies are completely uninteresting opponents and the Mesans lack the moral ambiguity that Haven always brought.